1. Field
Various features disclosed herein pertain generally to wireless communication systems, and at least some features pertain to devices and methods for implementing a reduced contention period to facilitate channel access for access terminals operating in a wireless communication system.
2. Background
Access terminals, such as laptop computers, personal digital assistant devices, mobile or cellular phones, personal media players, or any other device with a processor, that communicate with other devices through wireless signals are becoming increasingly popular and are used more frequently. Such increases in distribution and use of access terminals have resulted in the need for greater bandwidth.
In order to address the issue of increasing bandwidth demands, different schemes are being developed to allow multiple access terminals to communicate by sharing channel resources while achieving high data throughputs. Such schemes are being, or have been adopted by several emerging wireless communications standards such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standard. IEEE 802.11 denotes a set of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) air interface standards developed by the IEEE 802.11 committee for short-range communications (e.g., tens of meters to a few hundred meters).
As these schemes evolve for improving support for communications with multiple users, it may occur that some new features may not work with certain access terminals that are not adapted to implement one or more features of such schemes. These access terminals may be characterized as “legacy” access terminals. In addition, various features may require further adaptations to improve availability to multiple access terminals.
For example, one or more of these schemes for improving support for multiple-access communications include employing an access point (e.g., base station, etc.) to manage channel access among a plurality of associated access terminals (e.g., access terminals actively registered with a particular access point) by assigning transmit opportunities based on some form of priority. However, such priority-based channel access for associated access terminals may limit the ability for legacy access terminals and/or non-associated access terminals to access the transmission channel. This is especially true in high traffic scenarios where it is even more difficult for a legacy and/or non-associated access terminal to get a transmission opportunity amid an already high traffic load.